“Religion in the Sense of Striving for the Infinite”
“Religion in the Sense of Striving for the Infinite”
Faith, Pluralism, and Democratic Action
This chapter discusses the expressions of faith in the works of several black American writers and thinkers. These figures—Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, Pauli Murray, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X—practiced a faith that strove toward the infinite while also respecting the pluralism inherent in individual experience and contingent historical conditions. Instead of imagining the transcendent and the worldly as either separated by an infinite expanse of empty time and space, or as one and the same thing, they saw them as always running parallel to each other and sometimes converging in a moment of action in the here and now.
Keywords: faith, black American writers, God, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, Pauli Murray, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X
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